-
Feb 23, 1215
Magna Carta
The Magna Carta was one of the most important historical events that happened in the Middle Age era. The purpose of the Magna Carta was to stop the King and the way he did everything to make him govern by the old English laws that had prevailed before the Normans came. -
Jamestown Settlement
Jamestown was America's first permanent English colony. Captain John Smith became the colony’s leader in September 1608 – the fourth in a succession of council presidents – and established a “no work, no food” policy. Many of the original colonists were upper-class Englishmen, and the colony lacked sufficient laborers and skilled farmers. -
The Mayflower Compact
The Mayflower Compact was signed on Nov. 11, 1620 on board the Mayflower. The document attempted to temporarily establish a government until a more official one could be drawn up in England that would give them the right to self-govern themselves in New England. -
Petition of Right
The Commons leader Sir Edward Coke, a lawyer, came up with the Petition of Right. It's a statement of a person's fundamental rights which the King should agree to honor. -
English Bill of Rights
It guaranteed the right of British subjects to petition the king and to bear arms. It prohibited excessive bails and fines and cruel and unusual punishment. This British Bill of Rights protected far fewer individual rights than the American Bill of Rights adopted a century later. -
Albany Plan of Union
In June 1754 delegates from most of the northern colonies and representatives from the Six Iroquois Nations met in Albany, New York. There they adopted a "plan of union" drafted by Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania. Under this plan each colonial legislature would elect delegates to an American continental assembly presided over by a royal governor. -
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act was a direct tax imposed by the British Parliament specifically on the colonies of British America. The act required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp. -
Boston Massacre
On this bloody night, a small group of Boston colonists began throwing snowballs at and taunting the British military troops in order to vent their frustrations. The soldiers then retaliated by opening fire on the Bostonians, killing four of them. This event then became referred to as the Boston Massacre. -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea imported into the colonies. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. -
First Continental Congress
The First Continental Congress brought together representatives from each of the colonies, except Georgia, to discuss their response to the British Intolerable Acts. -
Intolerable Acts
The Intolerable Acts or the Coercive Acts are names used to describe a series of laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 relating to Britain's colonies in North America. The acts triggered outrage and resistance in the Thirteen Colonies that later became the United States, and were important developments in the growth of the American Revolution. -
The Declaration of Independence
In 1776, soon after the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, the leaders of the war got together to write a letter to the King of England. They wanted to explain why they were fighting to be their own country, independent of England. -
Second Continental Congress
After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, a Second Continental Congress met. Colonists were still thinking about the two battles. The Congress met on May 10, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is now called Indepence Hall. -
Articles of Confederation
It was an agreement among the 13 states that legally established the United States of America as a confederation of sovereign states and served as its first constitution. Its drafting by the Continental Congress began in mid 1776 and an approved version was sent to the states for ratification in late 1777. -
Shay's Rebellion
The rebellion started over financial difficulties and by January 1787, over one thousand Shaysites had been arrested. A militia that had been raised as a private army defeated an attack on the federal Springfield Armory by the main Shaysite force on February 3, 1787, and five rebels were killed in the action. -
Constitutional Convention
For four months, 55 delegates from the several states met to frame a Constitution for a federal republic that would last into "remote futurity." This is the story of the delegates to that convention and the framing of the federal Constitution. -
Connecticut Compromise
The Connecticut Compromise was an agreement that large and small states reached during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that explained the legislative structure and representation that each state would have under the United States Constitution. -
Philadelphia Convention
The Philadelphia Convention, now often referred to as the Constitutional Convention, was a meeting held in 1787 by delegates from the 13 states that then comprised the United States. At first, the purpose of the convention was to address the problems the federal government was having ruling the states and staying fiscally sound under the provisions of the Articles of Confederation, which had been the prevailing code for the government since 1777.
